Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Since the IPv4 address pool ran dry this month I decided it was high time I started practicing what I've been preaching for these last seven years and get DinkNet ready for World IPv6 Day on June 8th. Having dealt with the brain-dead technical support folks at my ISP too many times (once) in the past, I knew that wasn't the route to go, so I logged on to Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunnelbroker site and signed up.

Now, all the boxes on my wired network have globally routeable IPv6 addresses.

All my IPv6 traffic leaves the DinkNet wrapped in my ISP's IPv4 packets (6in4, not 6to4) and travels to Hurricane's IPv6 NOC in California, from which it goes wherever on the world wide IPv6 network, and back again.

Unfortunately I'm stuck on this end with some IPv4-only junk that's gotta go. The proxy, SQUID 2.x, doesn't do IPv6. My wireless access point (not a wireless router) is a dinosaur. My DNS, on Windows 2003, isn't going to hack it, which is yet another nail in the Windows coffin I've been constructing.

Luckily, upgrading SQUID to 3.1.11 fixed the other two problems. Wireless IPv4 clients can get IPv6 content just by using the proxy and since it does the DNS lookups on behalf of the clients that fixes the Windows DNS problem. IPv6-only clients can get IPv4 content as well.

And, with the addition of an IPv6 router advertising daemon (radvd), DHCP and all its headaches are out the fucking door, baby! All the IPv6-aware clients, including kludgy old Windows XP, self-configure and pick up their own globally-routable IPv6 addresses.